Smart Meters for Tenant Utilities

Commercial properties traditionally rely on manual meters to collect utilities data from tenants. Third-party service providers read the meters manually and tenants are then billed based on their electricity consumption.

However, such traditional metering systems result in higher operating costs and poor productivity. Resources are deployed to take manual readings and perform checks to verify readings. This increases risks of human error in recording and reporting and reduces efficiency. It can also cause unnecessary friction with tenants. Moreover, usage data from traditional meters cannot be obtained in a timely and accurate manner, making it harder to resolve tenant enquiries.

One solution is for landlords to tap on smart meters. Metering has been transformed with advances in technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Today’s Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) or smart meters are capable of real-time and advanced monitoring. This has enabled the digitisation and automation for building owners.

SP Digital, the digital arm of SP Group, believes that energy technology can help customers achieve efficiencies, cost and energy savings, and be sustainable. It’s Chief Executive Officer Chang Sau Sheong highlighted that SP Digital’s in-house solutions can help drive operational efficiency through automation, while helping customers contribute to a low carbon, smart energy future.

“We want to use digital capabilities to help our customers to deliver value for themselves, and for their tenants,” he said. Chang added that SP Digital is developing solutions that will allow customers to detect issues on the fly and feed information back to the operational team for them to be more effective in their work.

Property owners want to prioritise operational efficiency when it comes to managing tenants, as well as increasing rental yield and brand value. To achieve this, SP Digital developed the GET™ (Green Energy Tech) platform that integrates different building systems and diverse data sources. It provides landlords with a holistic and seamless experience in managing their buildings. The solutions and information gathered can also be used to help landlords improve their relationships with their tenants.

GET TenantCare, one of platform’s modules, allows landlords to efficiently manage tenant energy consumption and around common areas. It simplifies operational challenges involved in utility management, improves tenant engagement, and frees up valuable time for building owners to focus on their core business.

GET TenantCare – Using prompt and accurate data to achieve energy and cost savings

Chang mentioned that through the GET TenantCare module and smart meters, each tenant’s electricity consumption can be read every half hour, compared to the traditional monthly reading.

“That's very powerful, because it provides prompt and accurate information for both the tenants, who can then change and modify their behaviours to consume energy more efficiently. This also helps the operational teams, because they would have a better understanding of how tenants are consuming energy,” he said.

Chang added that with monthly utilities readings in a traditional system, it is hard to analyse what causes a surge in utility bills. This limits the ability to take proactive actions. GET TenantCare addresses these problems and reduces conflicts. Any anomalies in utilities consumption can be addressed immediately through anomaly detection algorithms and alerts. These then provide actionable insights almost immediately compared to waiting for monthly data.

“With GET TenantCare, we are able to go down to that granularity where you're able to detect things like water leaks, and figure out what the problem is, and where, because we have the data,” he said.

GET TenantCare also helps landlords in terms of revenue assurance as the use of smart meters significantly reduces human errors and prevents unnecessary revenue losses due to manual readings and inaccurate billing.

Chang further explained how operational efficiency and productivity can be improved during the tenant move-in and move-out process, “With a digitalised and automated approach, the utilities reading process, inspections, and a whole slew of work needed to record the correct data is made easier, thereby improving the tenant experience.”

GET TenantCare comes with SP Digital’s robust advanced metering infrastructure, as well as hardware and communications infrastructure that are standards compliant and reliable. It also uses a cost efficient, secure, and wireless in-building mesh network.

Whilst the use of automated tenant submetering systems might be a big adjustment for both tenants and owners, it will bring about greater efficiency in their daily lives and prevent any foreseeable problems.

SP Digital aims to further enhance the solution to assist a property’s finance team in identifying underbilled or overbilled tenants and act on it before they even receive customer complaints. Apart from this, they are working on deploying and adding capabilities to perform billing on behalf of the landlord. This will free up the property owners to focus on their core and strategic work to improve tenant satisfaction and business returns.

With SP Digital’s focus on advancing sustainability for customers, solutions like GET TenantCare can drive behavioural changes for both the tenants and the landlords in terms of how they view management of utilities.